Small Town Heroes

Folk outfit Hurray for the Riff Raff's Small Town Heroes borrows liberally from old-time traditions, including Appalachian reels, Big Easy R&B, and Piedmont blues. Yet these songs put a fresh and wily spin on old sounds and ideas, thanks to the formidable presence of singer/songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra.

“Delia’s gone, but I’m settling the score,” Alynda Lee Segarra sings on “The Body Electric,” the centerpiece of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s new album, Small Town Heroes. Over tense eddies of fiddle and sympathetic acoustic strums, her dry husk of a voice sounds more resigned than outraged, as she realizes she's too late to save Delia. Several decades too late, as the case may be: The Delia she’s singing about is the title character in the popular murder ballad "Delia's Gone", written by Dick Toops and Karl Silbersdorf and recorded by Bob Dylan, Harry Belafonte, Waylon Jennings, and multiple times by Johnny Cash. “The Body Electric” seeks to rescue Delia and so many other murder-ballad victims, offering an empathetic—and feminist—reading of an American folk tradition that lives on today in contemporary covers of “Banks of the Ohio” and “Knoxville Girl". Murder ballads allow us to act out dark urges, using history to guard us against accusations of sociopathy or misogyny. But Segarra laments our fascination with such abject subject matter: “Shoot me down, put my body in the river,” she sings, “while the whole world sings, sings it like a song/ The whole world sings like there’s nothing going wrong.”

For Segarra, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican who gravitated toward Bikini Kill before discovering Woody Guthrie, the past is not a thing to be revered. Rather, it must be endlessly, aggressively interrogated. Small Town Heroes borrows liberally from old-time traditions, including Appalachian reels, Big Easy R&B, and Piedmont blues, yet these songs put a fresh and wily spin on old sounds and ideas. Segarra rewrites Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues”, retitling it “The New SF Bay Blues” and changing the subject from a wronged woman to a brokedown touring van: “You’ve been a good old wagon/ You got me there in style”). “Crash on the Highway” subtly rewrites Roy Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway”, its two-step beat evoking the boredom and frustration of backed-up traffic. These are songs about touring as rambling; instead of hitchin’ rides and jumpin’ trains, Segarra and Hurray for the Riff Raff are gigging around the country in a cramped van.

Small Town Heroes may not sound like what you’d expect from a New Orleans album, yet it is anchored in that city’s sense of musical adventure. Segarra learned her trade playing in street bands and busking on corners, which has given her a broad musical vocabulary. She arranges and produces these songs as eloquently as she writes them, often using just a few instruments to convey a surprisingly full sound. “Blue Ridge Mountain” opens the album with her clawhammer banjo and what sounds like a clogger working together as a makeshift rhythm section, with Yosi Perlstein’s spry fiddle dancing around them. “No One Else” is built on a folk-rock foundation, yet it pitches and yaws on a rolling piano bassline that might have been learned from an old Fats Domino or Professor Longhair record.

With Small Town Heroes, Segarra proves herself one of the most compelling stylists in a folk revival full of suspicious acts either too beholden to tradition or too uncritical to make much of it. Perhaps the biggest difference between Hurray and its peers is attitude: Segarra understands that these styles don’t need to be revived, so she’s not playing dress-up and isn’t concerned with projecting any sense of rustic authenticity. Instead, she understands that these old sounds still thrum somewhere deep in the American subconscious, even if our relation to them changes with each passing year. With the whole country as its geographical and historical backdrop, Small Town Heroes is an album about how life and music intersect. Rather than play to her record collection, however, Segarra takes the records out of their sleeves, scratches them up, and makes the old music speak to new concerns.